Is it Scary or Exciting?! Dash!
The 100 Centimeter Dash! From the Shelf to the Button.
Have you seen this Dash thing?
I just don't know what to make of this affiliate link. Now, truth be told, I am a very low tech guy. (I've been working for weeks to make Street Politics a membership site. ANY of my LEAST techy friends would have had that up and running in December with about 1/2 hour's worth of work. I needed a 2-hour tutorial video. Anyway it will be up in March.)
Still, I knew we'd see things like these buttons some day. But now it is really here!
And the ramifications are mind-blowing.
I can use this!
Look at the first item in the illustration above. Iams. My dog eats the stuff by the metric ton! I hate humping those big bags from the supermarket. I could stick a Dash thingy to the wall in my mudroom and *doink* in a day or two, Maggie has a new bag of food.
The button runs on batteries. But no biggee. Three years from now, when the watch battery in it runs down, I go into my junk drawer and push the button that says batteries and that's fixed. Damn!
I have been planning a post on the "internet of everything" for a while. This is just a minuscule portion of the radical shifts we are going to see very soon. We are, in many ways, moving beyond some of the freakiest stuff ever imagined in Sci-fi movies.
If you are under 25 I feel a bit sorry for you. To you, these kinds of developments probably run between "cool" and "meh". But if you lived in a time when a four-pack assortment of Styrofoam gliders was an impressive toy, and Atari was mind-blowing, today's technology can be overwhelming. And I worked on missile systems in the early 90's!!!!!
In fact, my MK-26 launcher (the coolest weapons system ever built), with it's two racks of circuit cards had more computing power than the Apollo 11 Command Module. My cell phone has more power than those two systems - COMBINED! And now we have these buttons. Geeks and young people have no idea how much this freaks me out.
So okay, call me a Luddite. I'll own it. And it's not a bad thing. But our lives are changing at such an amazing rate.
A Slightly Bigger Picture
I recently read a Motley Fool sales letter talking about the "internet of everything". We are a hair's breadth away from a time when our cell phones, with near-zero preparation on our parts, will tell us that our car is being stolen and will be sending the thief's face recognition data to the police station before we can dial 911.
All the chatter, these days, is about bringing back manufacturing jobs to the U.S. That'll be great. But the possibilities coming with this technology, will make the manufacturing jobs little more than icing on the cake.
If you doubt that, look at Wawa stores. They added automated ordering to their deli. That didn't result in fewer people working in the stores. More had to be hired to keep up with the demand. That is what happens when you have high quality service and cutting-edge innovation.
I'm going to get a couple of these buttons. One for the Pop Tarts my doc says I'm not allowed to eat, and one for Maggie's 2-ton bag o'food. Let the FedEx guy test his Workman's Comp benefits.
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Your host, Matt Jordan is the author of Street Politics: It Ain't Your Daddy's GOP Anymore!
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